Lecture is first in series on "Understanding Virtue" Cosponsored by Fuller and Caltech
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05/24/11
Watch Stanley Hauerwas's talk on Vimeo.What role does habit play in the development of morality? In trying to do good, must we suppress our human passions or engage them? These were the kinds of questions addressed by theologian Stanley Hauerwas in a lecture, “Why Habit Matters: The Bodily Character of the Virtues," offered to an audience of more than 400 at Pasadena Presbyterian Church on May 19.
His talk, which was followed by a response from Caltech Professor of Philosophy Steven Quartz, was the first in a two-lecture series on “Understanding Virtue: New Directions Bridging Neuroscience and Philosophy” sponsored jointly by Caltech and Fuller Seminary’s Travis Research Institute.
The role of habit in our lives and the development of virtuous behavior are intimately intertwined, said Dr. Hauerwas, and a consideration of habit as described by the philosophers Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas can help us understand that relationship. Aristotle, emphasizing the significance of forming good habits early in life, claimed that “if we fail to instill right habits, we will have a character that is incapable of acting in a manner that makes us virtuous,” Hauerwas described. But the learning of good habits in itself is not enough to guarantee virtue—children can learn good habits for the wrong reasons, for example—and the more nuanced understanding of habit put forth by Aquinas, Hauerwas asserted, takes Aristotle’s account a step further by introducing the role of
will into the equation.
According to Aquinas, virtuous habit “is not a matter of the will being tamed by reason,” Hauerwas explained; rather, reason and will are interdependent and influence each other. “We are creatures shaped by our desires,” he said, with human passions that are the resource—the “engine”—through which virtuous habits are formed. In contrast to the stoics who would suppress these passions, Aquinas felt that “the presence of passions is a sign of the intensity of the will indicative of a greater moral capacity than would be the case if the passions were absent,” Hauerwas declared.
But the development of virtue is a process that depends heavily on God’s work in us, Hauerwas went on to say, noting the differences between “acquired virtues”—such as Aquinas’s cardinal virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and prudence—and the “infused virtues” of faith, hope, and love bestowed on us through grace. “We are not fully who we were created to be unless we are participants” in God’s work in us, shaped through habituation, believes Hauerwas. “We are always on our way to being virtuous,” he said, as “wayfarers on a journey of the soul to God.”
And although none of us is consistently virtuous in our actions—“The reality is that we live morally incoherent lives”—we must remember that “
hope is also a habit, and hope can pull us into a richer life,” stressed Hauerwas. “We are hardwired to be hopeful beings, making it impossible to ever be satisfied with where we are. And isn’t that hopeful?”
In his response to Hauerwas’s lecture, Dr. Quartz commented on the striking parallels that tend to emerge in research findings across different disciplines—including the significance of habit. “The single most important advance in neuroscience over recent times is [the discovery of] the critical, centralizing importance of habit in all behavior,” he affirmed. Explaining that habit-driven behavior occupies the middle ground in our lives between basic instincts and more complex goals, Quartz emphasized that “the habit system in our brain is extraordinarily powerful.”
“Although the language is different between a neuroscientist and an ethicist,” he concluded, “at the end of the day we are talking about the same things.”
The second lecture in the “Understanding Virtue” series was delivered the following evening, May 20, by Christian Keysers, professor for the social brain at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. Focusing on "The Vicarious Brain: The Neural Basis of Empathy, Learning by Observation, and Sociopathy," Dr. Keysers—also head of the Social Brain Lab of the prestigious Netherlands Institute for Neurosciences—discussed the important role that vicarious brain activity plays in the development of virtue as well as sociopathic behavior. His presentation, given before an audience of 250 at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium, was followed by a response from Fuller Professor of Christian Philosophy Nancey Murphy, who drew from her own research on the relationships between theology, neuroscience, and philosophy of the mind.
The lecture series was part of a two-day conference funded by a grant—“The Rationality of Ultimate Value: Emotion, Awareness, and Causality in Virtue Ethics and Decision Neuroscience”—awarded by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences,
Science and Transcendence Advanced Research Series, to an interdisciplinary team of investigators led by psychologist Warren Brown, director of Fuller’s Travis Research Institute. The project’s goal is a deeper understanding of the nature of virtue in relation to the transcendent, and studies moral exemplars and how they see the world, their psychological makeup, and their patterns of brain activity while making virtue-relevant decisions.